Devotion

Chaitanya was always jealous of Rajan. Not of his two extra legs or his long trunk, but the fact that his father spent all his day with Rajan and not him. Chaitanya's father was a mahout in the Periyar National Park, and he was Chaitanya's most favourite person in the whole wide world. He loved how his father would come back exhausted and hug him from behind. His father knew how to make him laugh when he was sad or depressed. He was proud of his dad for being the tourists' most sought after mahout and how he held so much knowledge about the secrets of the park, which was a vast illusory area of dense evergreen forests gasconading of fragrant sandalwoods to bearing jamuns to sacred figs and medlies of flowers in every colour and trick. With branched streams flowing with the soft delectable sound of water gushing smoothing porous rocks as it goes. Of waterfalls cascading in the middle of dense forests. For Chaitanya, the land was his infinite home and he had never seen or felt the need to see the world outside. In his life of seven years he had learnt the forest ways, clambering up tall tress to get sweet mangoes, running through inpenetrable forests and bathing in the rivers with the elephants. Chaitanya knew he shared the forest with a diverse number of animals and he had learned to care for them deeply, much like he loved his eight month old sister Sulekha. He even liked the monkeys more than Sulekha since they weren't as noisy as her and were far more entertaining (all she did was cry, eat and sleep). However he could never get himself to love Rajan, the elephant as much as his Achan and Amma did. They would sit beside him and stroke his fat back and talk to him like he could hear them. His father not only spent his entire days working with Rajan but would also spend his time at home caring and loving the big mammal.  The little boy was so envious of Rajan he on multiple times took him to a point far off from home and leave him there but Rajan found his way back consistently, once returning even before Chaitanya. His father had been with the now thirty two year old elephant ever since he was ten years old and had essentially grown up with him. He had tried to set the ball rolling between Chaitanya and Rajan by asking Chaitanya to bathe Rajan or to feed him bananas. But he never got over his resentment for Rajan.

One day, when he was out by his hut, practising the alphabet he had just learnt in school when Madhav the neighbor's son came and gave the dreadful news to Chaitanya's mother. His father had fatefully drowned in the boat he had set out on to reach the town to meet some far off relatives. Chaitanya could not fully understand what had happened until he saw his mother falling to her knees and breaking down. It hit him with the impact of a hundred gypsies how his Achan would never come home and hug him tightly from behind. He would never see his father's kind smile. Last night's story of the jackal who tried to eat a drum had been his last one. He sat with his amma inside the house for what seemed like a century. She either cried uncontrollably or went absolutely still. He took Sulekha in his lap and wished with every molecule of his thin body to God to return his Achan.

It was three days when he finally ventured outside the tiny hut, when the other kids called Chaitanya outside to divert his mind from the painful incident. He was standing remembering happy moments with Achan when he felt something grip him from behind and hold him tightly. It was an elephant's trunk, it was Rajan.

Conversation with Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

Devika: Hello Professor, what brings you out to this part of the world?

Albus: It is only in places away from home do we find ourselves. We are unmasked from all the  grief of being who we are, we turn inwards and realize what has been there forever.

Devika: But. I don't understand.

Albus: A soul as young is yours is not touched by the burdens of the cacophonous world. Tenderness and enthusiasm dominate your world and there is no scope for the ramblings of an old man like me.

Devika: Whoever said you are old? Flamel lived till  he was more than six and a half centuries old, you're 132. All you need do to is metamorphosize that white beard into a darker shade.

Albus:  How very kind of you. My friend Nicolas Flamel was a vibrant person, with the hopes and humour of an adolescent child. I would even say he died rather young.

Devika: Being young comes with it's own set of tragedies. Heartaches and failures.

Albus: A pained heart is one that has been loved. One that has once upon a time swelled with joy. You age, you lose energy and vibrancy but the one thing that stays with you is the love that grew in you and the love that grew you.

As for failures, a mistake is only a failure when it is not taken inside in through a hole not too wide to give you direction.

Devika: But you achieved so much with age. The position of Supreme Mugwump and Chief Warlock, you achieved only after you were well into your second innings. Does age not make you wiser?

Albus: I'm afraid I have to answer with a little less of modesty but I was always associated with genius. Yes, you may become wiser. You may know more and you may have greater insight. Yet, the vitality of young age always trumps. You're full of bubbles of hope and you have yet to achieve the summit of brilliance. It's the climb up to the top rather than the top itself. At the top, it's just a lot of wind outside but lack of oxygen inside.

Devika: What if one's early youth wasn't the happiest one? Is it possible to ever overcome losses that settled in early? Is it possible to rise again?

Albus: Have you met my bird, Fawkes?

Devika: A beautiful creature. Only we can't replenish ourselves with that ease.

Albus: Easy is never the antidote. One should rather fail in a difficult task than find success in one that never really challenged us.

( Albus eats a Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans.)

Albus: Seaweed, great improvement over my last hair flavored one.

Devika: Professor, don't you think it's harsh to live in a world with magic?

Albus: There is no world without magic. It's the one thing that lives inside each of us, inside our very toenails and gums. It can be found in the beautiful world more than it can be found in the wood of a wand.  Magic is not in spells, it's in the comfort of the poetry of music.

A magic is what I call a blossoming flower, a baby's smile, a summer love and the laughs with friends. It's in the very essence of life.

Devika: That does give hope to the muggle world. It does. Thank you Professor.

Albus: Now if you will kindly excuse me, I'll get into my nightsuit and retire for the day. A man my age should be in bed by this time. Pip pip.

Voices Lost and Found.

Cold, biting cold. razing wind, blowing to erase. Hard frozen ground, hurting with every step she took. Yet something kept Shalini returning to the neighborhood park of Jangpura everyday. It wasn't the neatly kept flowerbeds or the half broken tiles of the pavement. It was her asylum, the place where she would come to make sense of her thoughts or get rid of them completely. It was all that was pleasing about the society was to her. The jogging track, where teenage girls and middle aged aunties would come to lose a pound or two and end up gossiping and eating chocobars. The green grass, where old gentlemen play incomprehensible games of cards. The park itself, where the beautiful scenes of children hugging their grandparents or fighting with each over tipi tipi tap unfolded. It was where innocence was all abundant but threatened by the goons who would come to whistle and stare. The park, no more than ordinary was hardly a hundred meters away from her decent two-storey house which she shared with her parents and younger brother. Gupta Residence. It was in every sense, a house  of Dilli. Where people would not tend to look meticulously dirty and where they would look- swanky and adorned by the rakshash with the tongue dripping with blood. A house of unfinished voices, be it the press-wali, the maid ot the occasional shani devta guy who somehow surprisingly was to be found only on Saturdays. The sometimes irritating call for dinner or the argument over who brought in the dirty shoes. It wasn't a mistake to be loud, it was the sole purpose. But in ways that no one understands, it was these voices that made the house a home and the absence of these wasn't a mark of a good home.

Shalini Gupta was an assistant manager at a Toronto based software firm- Code.inc, the office of which was located in Pamposh Enclave, a relatively posh locality with an almost equal distribution of offices and housing complexes in the heart of South Delhi. Shalini had forever lived in Delhi, made great friends here. She loved the city for what it was- her home and being a place with a beating heart. Delhi, the mighty city of paradox. The budding metropolitan of shiny crease-less roads on whose pavements the destitute spread their non-existing bed-sheets. The old world city with the modern Metro network whose buttons looked under pressure from the sheer excess of people. It was the city which welcomed openly people of all ethnicities and the city of show-offs. The city where delectable chat and fancy Italian restaurants are found side by side. In it resided the law-making machinery of the country,but also the largest number of rapists in the country. It was the place where the horrendous incident had taken place.

Brutal is a word that cannot even begin to describe the realities of the gangrape of a 23 year-old girl. It was a crime against every good in the world. The girl, who died fighting for her life was no one to Shalini and everything to what the new young India stands for- hope, ambition, courage and will. She just wanted to catch a new movie in the theatre. Some may say she was unfortunately at the wrong place at the wrong time but why should there be a wrong place or time at all? Everyone knows that the only thing wrong was the intention of the monstrous rapists.

Shalini had herself been a victim of almost-rape. She had been dragged down to a shady corner but had miraculously made an escape. What she had went through for those twenty minutes, the horror she had faced  had taken away the essence of her- her aspirations, her character and her playful act of being. She could not be in the company of people anymore. She couldn't travel to office in the bus she previously took. She could never trust a man again. The damage was etched on her mind and would stay for the rest of her life. But it was not enough. As the culprits had somehow failed to complete what they had set out to do, it was not enough for the policemen, not enough for the nation to take notice and stand up. She stood up and continued her life like before and let go of the past, but she could never see a happy moment now, for she knew she could be raped just the next moment. Her offenders were roaming about in the same city.

The uprising that had followed the incident had been a hammer on the ice of indifference and inaction of the general public. Women and men united in their will to fight the evils that are so prevalent and deeply rooted in the culture which India prides itself on. Where devis are worshipped in the day and drowned in the night. Youth who could've comfortably been sipping coffee braved the lathi charge and water cannons on the chilly Delhi mornings. Shalini picked up courage to join them. There, in every protesting girl, she could see a victim of teasing or someone who had been visually raped for being a girl, something less than a being. Girls who had gone through this so routinely that they hardly came to think of it as a crime anymore. The event made them realize that it was not okay. It was not something you could or should dismiss as chalta hai, kya karein. The very grassroot of it had to be chopped down. Zero tolerance was echoed.The youth was exhausted of a country a parliament so uncaring, a judiciary so weak and jail bars so supple.

In the protests, Shalini found the voice she had once lost. The spirit of yesterday returned and hope for the future a bit more secured. A new firmness found to take to the neighborhood park.